If you’re a rock and roll musician in the classic tradition, sooner or later you’ve got to cover Fats Domino. The New Orleans pianist and singer-songwriter was one of rock’s foremost pioneers and is credited with one of the very first rock and roll singles.
So it’s a little surprising that Bruce hasn’t covered him more than he has–and that we have to go all the way back to 1974 to find the best example.
But oh, what an example.
“Let the Four Winds Blow” was never one of Domino’s greatest hits. Peaking at #15, the 1961 single stood in the shadow of many other more successful Domino tracks.
(Domino’s recording wasn’t even the original version of the song. Although he’d co-written it, it was his collaborator Dave Bartholomew who first took it to market in 1955.)
“I’m Ready,” another Domino single, notched lower still when it was released in 1959.
But something about those two tracks grabbed the attention of a young Bruce Springsteen, who covered “Let the Four Winds Blow” with the E Street Band throughout 1974 and appended “I’m Ready” to it for a few shows that June.
In June 1974, the E Street Band hadn’t yet fully left its Bruce Springsteen Band days behind. With David Sancious on keys and–for a brief moment in time–“Boom” Carter on the drums, the E Street Band stood at the intersection of jazz and rock, and nowhere can we hear that gumbo more clearly than in their performance of “Let the Four Winds Blow.”
Take a listen to their performance below and prepare to be blown away by The Big Man at his most ferocious and carried along by the light-on-his-keys Sancious at his ivory-tickling best.
By the time the band segues into “I’m Ready,” the band is operating at full force, careening through a nearly twelve-minute performance before crashing to a mic-drop of a finish.
It’s one of the finest moments of that transitional incarnation of the E Street Band, and while Bruce would cover Fats Domino again someday, it would never be quite like this.
Let the Four Winds Blow
First performed: January 6, 1973 (Cambridge, MA)
Last performed: August 28, 1997 (Hollywood, CA)
why don’t Bruce-Landau Inc release one of those shows as part of the archive series???? It’s definitely part of the E Street legacy
Interesting comment in the Paul Williams interview from October 13, 1974: “See, I never had a record player for years and years. It was a space from when my parents moved out west and I started to live by myself, from when I was seventeen until I was twenty-four, and I never had a record player. So It was like I never heard any albums that came out ofter, like ’67 [laughs]. And I was never a social person who went over to other’s people’s housed and got loaded and listened to records — I nver did that. And I didn’t have an FM radio, so I never heard anything, From that time on, from around ’67 until just recently when I got a record player, I lived wiht Diane [Rosito] and she had an old beat-up one that only old records sounded good on. So that’s all I played. Those old Fats Domino records, they sounded great on it.